What Hetty Did is the seventh novel by J.L. Carr, published in 1988 when he was 76 years old. The novel describes the experiences of an 18-year-old girl. Hetty Birtwisle has been brought up by adoptive parents in the Fens; after a beating by her father, discovering that she was adopted, she flees to Birmingham where she has learnt she was born and alters her surname to Beauchamp. Hetty Beauchamp comes across several characters from Carr's other novels in the boarding house in which she lives, including Emma Foxberrow, a teacher in The Harpole Report and Edward Peplow, from A Day in Summer.